Grassroots News & Progressive Views

If you just can’t bring yourself to give up on the sordid consumer frenzy and go all in for a Buy Nothing Christmas, then perhaps getting your loved ones a few good books to help them navigate our dark times is the next best thing.

Here is my list of a handful of some of the best books of the last awful year:Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLeanNo is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi KleinThoreau, A Life by Laura Dassow WallsNew York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

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That’s the thing I’ve been thinking to myself as the frenetic news cycle over the past year has veered from political chaos to natural disaster and back again in a vertigo-inducing downward spiral. Increasing social division domestically as the rich pillage the rest of us, the intensified threat of international conflict, the brazen plundering of the commons, and utter disdain for the natural world amidst a myriad of sexual harassment scandals and horrifying mass shootings are punctuated by catastrophic natural disasters from the epic fires to supercharged hurricanes and yet more fearsome firestorms.

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Back during the halcyon days of the Obama administration, political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University published a seminal study on American democracy that illustrated that:

Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

This threat to our democracy was the product of the fact that, according to Gilens and Page, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” [Read more…]

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One would think that in the midst of the Trump era, with so many threats not just to essential government policies and programs but to democracy itself, Democrats would have a pretty clear idea of who their enemy is.

A reasonable observer might also conclude that the Democratic Party in California which has, in many ways, been the vanguard of resistance nationwide would be laser-focused on not only maintaining the blue wall but on working to oust California Republicans from the House of Representatives.

Clearly, it would also seem to make sense that with Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education and the National Republican Party dead set on undermining public education in the service of moneyed interests, that Democrats would be rigorously defending it. And at a time when the Supreme Court will soon rule against public sector unions, one of the core constituencies of the Democratic Party’s base, that Democrats would have the backs of their longtime allies. [Read more…]

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One of the things that I am grateful for this Thanksgiving is the fact that I am fortunate enough to teach Henry David Thoreau every fall, particularly this 200th year since the great American author’s birth.

Most of my students at City College have lived, worked, and struggled more than your average college student and, consequently, Thoreau’s call to avoid a life of “quiet desperation” speaks to them more profoundly than it might to other students from different circumstances. Simply put, they are in a college English class reading literature because they have chosen to be there. Running against the grain of all the siren calls for a more market-based education driven by efficiency and expediency, many of my students have decided that what moves them most is to read and think and to live a life they hope will be more meaningful because of it.

Hence, before my students even get to this great old courage teacher, they have chosen to live “deliberately” as Thoreau put it. And that, of course, is one of the central lessons that Thoreau still teaches us: that we can insist on choices and that those choices really matter. They have moral consequences. They make us who we are. [Read more…]

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Last week brought welcome news for those of us looking for some light at the end of the tunnel as we close in on the first year of the Trump era when voters repudiated Republican rule by handing resounding victories to Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere around the country.

While this is clearly a morale booster for beleaguered progressives, let’s hope that it does not stop folks from continuing to ask the hard questions that need to be answered if we truly want to change the course of the country from the dangerous path we are on.

Some of those questions were beginning to be debated with a fresh focus in the wake of Donna Brazile’s revelations about the 2016 campaign in the days leading up to the good electoral news on Tuesday. While most of the coverage belabored the question of whether or not the Democratic primary was “rigged,” what was more important about Brazile’s recounting of her time at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was what she revealed about the culture of the Clinton campaign and the national party. [Read more…]

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Fear and loathing in the classroom? Not exactly, but things aren’t that great either. According to a new study released last week by my union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the advocacy group the Badass Teachers Association (BAT), educators are feeling significantly more stressed these days.

As Education Week reports, “The survey found that educators find work to be stressful 61 percent of the time—and nearly a quarter of respondents said work was ‘always’ stressful. Meanwhile, workers in the general population report that work is stressful 30 percent of the time.”

The result of this is that the mental health of the educators who serve our children is suffering. USA Today’s coverage of the AFT/BAT study explains that of the teachers who were surveyed, “58% said their mental health was ‘not good’ for seven or more of the previous 30 days. A similar survey in 2015 found just 34% of respondents felt the same.” [Read more…]

But, as in a lot of horror movies, so many things in San Diego politics never seem to die — they just keep coming back, over-and-over again. That’s just how we roll here in the place “where happy happens.” It’s not scary, but it’s not particularly exciting either.

While the vast majority of people in San Diego are not paying the least bit of attention to local races heading into 2018, there has been quite a bit of petty drama surrounding the San Diego Board of Supervisors District 4 race in recent weeks. It appears that local Republican operatives have decided to kill Nathan Fletcher’s most recent political aspirations with a strong dose of my all-powerful San Diego Free Press mojo from the 2013 mayor’s race by quoting me extensively on an anti-Fletcher website and, if my social media feed can be trusted, some people are in quite a twist about it. [Read more…]

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Longtime San Diego resident, writer, educator, and activist Mel Freilicher was the editor of the regional literary journal Crawl Out Your Window for 15 years and taught at San Diego State and in UCSD’s literature department for several decades. In addition to this, Mel has published in a wide range of publications and anthologies including two chapbooks on Standing Stone Press and Obscure Publications.

His last two books on San Diego City Works Press, “The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives” and “The Encyclopedia of Rebels” engage radical American history in a way that brings together serious fiction, history, fantasy, memoir, humor, and political commentary in the service of excavating some of the lost stories of the American left and countercultures.

With “American Cream,” Freilicher gives us yet another unique window into the past as a way to cope with the dark present. As writer Stephen Paul Martin explains, “Within the nimble universe of Frelicher’s language, we see these people as we’ve never seen them—as people. But also as subversive signifiers in an unprecedented aesthetic design.” [Read more…]

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Last week in the second part of my review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, I noted how the complicity of neoliberal Democrats with the aims of the Right is one of the reasons why fighting the Koch brothers of the world has been so difficult. Thinking they are reasonably compromising or engaging in a savvy war of position, these Democrats are instead simply crab walking us over a cliff.

And while I wish that our current circumstances were so extreme that it has scared even the most feckless of Democrats away from this kind of all-too-clever triangulation, it appears that some people never learn.

Locally, one need look no further than our own crab walker-in-chief, Scott Peters, to see how this works.[Read more…]

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Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America is disturbing reading. Last week, I outlined how she exposes the missing link of the Right’s plan to “save capitalism from democracy—permanently.” As centrally important as it is to understand that basic premise of the Right’s agenda, it is equally valuable for progressives to learn precisely how and why that is the case and what, ultimately, the end-game looks like…

…In this way every time a Democrat supported privatizing a public service, outsourcing, or applying “market approaches” to solving problems, they were unknowingly doing the bidding of the wrecking crew. Hence, the free trade agreement-pushing, corporate education and charter school-loving, and Wall Street-abetting crew of New Democrats at all levels have really been tools of the highest order unless, of course, they knew better all along and were simply comfortable making deals with the devil. Either way, they too are responsible for the mess we are in at present. [Read more…]

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Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” is the single most important new book for progressives to read this year if they want to understand how we got to the dark moment of the present.

As I noted in my recent column on the right-wing assault on public sector unions, MacLean takes us to the roots of the current crisis via an intellectual history of James McGill Buchanan, the thinker whose work, more than anyone else’s, informs the machinations of the Kochtopus, that shadowy network of interlinked billionaire-funded right-wing think tanks driving American politics.

If you want to know the central ideas behind the “dark money” that Jane Mayer’s seminal book addresses and the philosophical origins of the neoliberalism that Naomi Klein analyzes in her work, MacLean’s text is the key. In it, we learn that Buchanan is the intellectual godfather of an intentionally dishonest, stealth movement by the right to “save capitalism from democracy—permanently.” [Read more…]